the problem with becoming your ideal self

“you seem pretty directionless for a girl who had a plan”

“you seem pretty directionless for a girl who had a plan”

A single sentence overlaid on a video.

I couldn't tell you who posted it, or what the video behind it was, though I do know the same ten seconds of an Olivia Rodrigo song quietly serenaded me as the clip played in an endless, mocking loop.

"you seem pretty directionless for a girl who had a plan"

I had watched it. Then watched it again. And for good measure, a few more times.

The faint glow of the screen bounced off my cheeks in the dark as I sat in a catatonic trance. The thing about being called out by a stranger on the internet is that it only works if some part of you already believes it.

I did have a plan.

For most of my life, I have had a plan. Not necessarily a detailed one — more of a general trajectory. A sequence of milestones that felt obvious enough. Do well in school. Get into college. Find a good job. Move out. Build a dream career. Become the kind of person you imagined you would be.

There was always a next step. And because there was always a next step, there was always a direction. There was always a version of me waiting somewhere ahead, and it felt remarkably straightforward. The specifics changed over the years, but the structure remained the same.

When I was younger, I imagined adulthood as a kind of final form. People seemed to have figured it out — careers, relationships, homes, routines, certainty. They moved through the world with a confidence that made me assume they had reached some invisible destination that I simply hadn’t gotten to yet. So I spent years working towards it, always assuming I was a work in progress.

Or maybe more accurately, I assumed the best version of me was still somewhere ahead.

At face value, that sounds like a healthy thing to believe. It probably is, to a degree. Most ambitious people seem to operate under some version of this assumption. We talk about growth and self-improvement and becoming the person we’re meant to be. Entire corners of the internet are dedicated to refining and reinventing ourselves — the underlying message usually the same: keep going. You’re not there yet.

It meant I didn’t need to have everything figured out right now because I was still becoming. The ideal version of me was still ahead. The version who had finally cracked the code on adulthood and knew exactly what she was doing.

I think I just expected that version of me to arrive eventually.

Not passively, obviously — I wasn’t waiting for some magical transformation. I just … assumed that after enough years of trying, enough goals accomplished, enough lessons learned, I would round a corner and find myself feeling a little more complete than I did before.

The problem is that achievements have never felt like endings to me.

If you’re a runner, you probably know the feeling of watching miles tick by during a race, and based on your watch, the finish should be just around the next corner. You’ve started bargaining with yourself. Just make it to the next turn. Just hold this pace a little longer. The finish line is around the corner. Only to turn the corner to nothing but another stretch of road.

That's what so much of my life has felt like. Every mile seemed to promise a finish that never got closer. I was barely accomplishing the thing before moving onto the next. Always reaching for this ideal version of myself.

The things we thought would make us feel complete at eighteen weren't the same things we wanted at twenty-two. And the things we wanted at twenty-two weren't the things we want at twenty-six. Every time I reached a milestone, the target shifts.

The ideal self has a way of behaving like a mirage. You move toward it and it moves too.

I’ve noticed there is a distinct contradiction in ambition. Achievement relies on dissatisfaction. At some level, you have to believe there is a better version of yourself worth chasing. Otherwise why would you put yourself through the effort of becoming? Some degree of dissatisfaction is what gets us out of bed in the morning. It’s what convinces us to apply for the job, train for the race, move to the new city, start the company, write the book. It creates momentum.

The problem is that momentum and self-worth can become tangled together.

I don't think the goal of life is to stop evolving. And I definitely don't think wanting more from and for yourself is the problem. I do think it can also come with a cost.

Over time, we became very good at improving ourselves and surprisingly bad at belonging to ourselves. It’s the feeling of having spent years following a plan only to realize the plan was built around an ideal self we don’t even want anymore, but kept striving for.

Nobody tells you is that your ideal self has an expiration date. Priorities change, values changed, definition of success change. That’s abundantly true for most of us. Which means there is something slightly absurd about dedicating your life to chasing a fixed ideal self.

We spend years pursuing versions of ourselves imagined by younger versions of ourselves. So by the time we become young adults, it’s only to discover we’ve changed our minds. The career we wanted isn’t the career we want now, and the life we imagined isn’t the life we imagine now.

The definition of success we built our plans around no longer fits quite as neatly as it once did. And now we’re left directionless with no stepping stones in clear sight.

Becoming your ideal self is nearly impossible. You will always want something more. And the longer you spend chasing an ideal version of yourself, the easier it becomes to see yourself primarily through the lens of improvement. Until eventually, you stop relating to yourself as a person and start relating to yourself as a project.

If becoming is the thing giving your life structure, what happens when there’s nowhere obvious left to go? What happens when the version of yourself you’ve spent years chasing no longer feels relevant? What happens when you realize you’ve become that self, and it isn’t who you want to be anymore?

I’ve been wondering whether there is a difference between growing as a person and treating yourself as a perpetual work in progress. Whether there is a point where self-improvement quietly becomes self-rejection. Whether some of us have become so focused on becoming someone else that we’ve forgotten how to belong to the person already here.

That in the pursuit of becoming a more ideal version of ourselves, we’ve become convinced our lives won't begin until we become it. And I think that may be the most harmful problem with becoming our ideal self.

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